It's incredibly rare that a set turns out exactly as intended, but it sometimes happens. Like this one - the intention was to make a set that looked like coffee, and that's just what we got!
Fittingly, this set was sold as a gift for a barista!
Iceland. One of the most beautiful, weird, friendly places I've ever visited.
Like everyone else, I mostly remember being amazed by both the graphics and the price. Nobody I knew had one, except one guy who acquired it using money he'd raised through, shall we say, illicit means. As such, he kept it under his bed all the time in case his parents ever found out and nobody saw it. Come to think of it, he may have been making the whole thing up...
As mentioned elsewhere, this was the first system I was enthusiastic about emulating.
This set uses one of my favourite techniques - hydro-dipping (or marbling).
With this technique, you drip special inks onto the surface of some water to make a pattern, then carefully dip a blank dice down into the water so that the ink folds around it. You then cast the patterned blank in resin to seal it.
I tried Memori, a Celeste-style platformer with some cool puzzle mechanics. Some of the rooms were super-hard, which made completing them feel very satisfying. It has a chunky-pixel look and controls really well. The front-end UI needs a tiny bit of polish, but other than that I really enjoyed it. Can imagine it'll be popular with speedrunners.
The skulls in these dice were 3D printed on an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro printer and hand painted. Then they were cast in blank dice, then recast in proper moulds.
We did a run of this design as a full set last year and it proved popular. This time we're doing a run of D6s (for Warhammer/Yahtzee fans!).
I've been lurking and waiting for a dice making community to pop up :)
Dice making was our "pandemic thing". We just started down that rabbit hole one day and it grew and grew. We ended up making and selling a lot of dice, including this set.
It's a petri pour set - where you drip various inks into resin and gravity pulls down creeping strands into the dice body while it cures.
Life has got in the way of making more sets this last six months, but I'm looking for inspiration to get back into it.
I just cannot get beyond "rad".
Doom, no question. I was an Amiga owner at the time, and we were used to being the go-to platform for computer gaming. Then Doom came along and pretty much sent the Amiga scene on a quest for a "Doom clone" that it would never achieve.
I never actually go into the room, weirdly. The dream is more focused on the shock and confusion of finding a door I'd never noticed before.
I'm nearly fifty, thirty years since I last did a school exam, and I still have recurring dreams about them. Weird, because I didn't have any stress or anxiety at the time... at least not conscious stress.
My dream takes the same basic form as yours. I am approaching a time when I know there should be an exam, but I haven't been to the class at all for the year. Mostly the dream consists of me hoping no-one will mention the exam and I can just kind of pass it by default. It makes no sense.
Other recurring dreams:
How familiar are you with retro gaming generally? If you're not familiar at all, there are some of the real classics that are extremely playable today:
Back when I first started using the internet, early-mid 90s, there was a feeling that we were in control - the users. The giant corporations hadn't taken over yet, content was all user generated, the apps and early sites were all user run. It was weird, uncontrolled, unpredictable, janky as hell... but also really cool.
Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, feel like that again.
I'm almost reluctant to post suggestions about what I'd like to see on Lemmy/kbin. It feels kind of entitled, you know? It's early days and there are obviously lots more important things to get stable and established first. Not to mention the devs are doing this for free and about to come under a lot of pressure. As a dev myself, used to listening to users making subjective demands about the "right" direction to take an app, I fully sympathise :)
That said, my offerings for the suggestion pile would be:
Discoverability - finding and joining communities isn't intuitive at the moment. This seems to be a fediverse problem rather than a lemmy/kbin problem, as Mastodon has similar issues. It should be as simple as "search for a topic, hit subscribe". Instead it involves copy pasting cryptic strings of text, editing them sometimes, then searching, and a bit of hoping. I think this will be the number one issue that impacts adoption.
UX - more one for lemmy than kbin, but there are improvements that could be made to the UI to improve user experience. A general tidy up to improve visuals (things like alignment of community names without icons, for example), ordering of lists of communities, external links opening in the same tab (appreciate some prefer this, but it tends to lose your place in a feed).For kbin, easy access to your list of subscriptions would be great.
Honestly, most of the UX stuff is low priority compared to getting the apps stable and coping with scale. I hope they figure out those wider challenges though, because there's definitely a lot of promise here.
Steamdeck owner since August last year, here. And I love it... As a traditional console gamer, it's been great to dig into my basically untouched Steam library that I've steadily accumulated with Humble Bundles over the last decade or more. Steam sales are a game changer... I've discovered so many titles I would have otherwise missed! I should say that I am 99% a docked gamer as well, and the Steamdeck works absolutely fine like this.
In terms of games - I've just started Ori and the Blind Forest (currently on sale). I'm also playing Final Fantasy XIV on and off. I spent 120+ hours on Elden Ring on the deck. And I'm patiently waiting for the Dark Souls games to go on sale so I can pick them up and start yet another playthrough.
About 13 years ago, I made this fella.
https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg
It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.
It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.